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Which came first, Microsoft or Python?

Which came first, Microsoft or Python?
Microsoft
1975 — 16 years before Python

Microsoft came first, by 16 years. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

Side by side

Microsoft Python
Year 1975 1991
Date 1975-04-04 1991-02-20
Category company technology
What happened Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 publicly.

Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in April 1975 to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — a product they had demonstrated before writing all of it. It predates Apple by almost exactly one year. The hyphen was dropped in 1976 and the company moved to Washington state in 1979.

Python

Python was started as a hobby project over Christmas 1989 and first released publicly in February 1991 — four years before Java, JavaScript, PHP and Ruby, all of which arrived in 1995. Most people assume it is much newer because its popularity arrived twenty years after it did. It is named after Monty Python, not the snake.

Common questions

Which came first, Microsoft or Python?
Microsoft, by 16 years — 1975 against 1991.
When did Microsoft start?
1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.
When did Python start?
1991. Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 publicly.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked